Old frumps should just shut up

Test your knowledge of cultural symbolic logic by answering the following question:

Kate Middleton is young and comely. Hilary Mantel is middle aged and, well, unfortunate-looking. If Mantel criticizes Middleton, what does that make Mantel?

Answer: bitter and jealous. Also, a fat ugly cow.

Across the pond and here in the states, Mantel is being pilloried for her alleged pillorying of the poor pretty princess, pregnant to boot and utterly defenseless against the envious author, now considered the modern-day embodiment of the evil queen, albeit more literary.

I knew Mantel was in trouble as soon as I saw her picture in the British tabloids. Sure, she’s a two-time winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, but did you see those crooked teeth? And check out that hair — dull and dry, the complete opposite of Kate’s lush and flowing locks.

Mantel is taking undeserved heat for daring to make remarks about Kate that go well beyond the standard isn’t-she-lovely compliments typically heaped on the adorable duchess. In a thoughtful lecture organized by the London Review of Books, Mantel suggested that Kate appeared “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished.” She also indicated that Kate’s role is to be admired and to breed, and called her “as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”

Context is key. Mantel wasn’t claiming to know Kate; she was discussing her as perception, in relation to royals of history, and was noting that the royal family and media have traditionally manipulated women. No big revelation there. And she ended the talk with a call for civility in our fixation with the royals.

But her remarks have sparked such a frenzy in Britain, you’d think the queen was caught drunk in a village pub without her knickers. Prime Minister David Cameron weighed in from India to provide a proper English harumph, while the tabloids showed their typical tasteful restraint with screaming front-page headlines.

Of course, the tabloids now decrying Mantel’s “born to breed” characterization are the same ones that treat Kate’s ballooning middle with the awe typically reserved for a meteor streaking across the sky in Russia. Online, they provide helpful links to other breaking news, such as “Kate Middleton goes on a shopping spree with royal baby bump,” as though she had the choice to leave it back at the palace.

Naturally, comparisons to Kate’s luminous beauty and Mantel’s middle-aged frumpiness abound, because any older woman who criticizes a younger female does so because she’s a jealous word-that-rhymes with witch. This reaction also occurred in the states whenever an older female writer took Sarah Palin to task for being a silly dope. Or so I’ve heard. If a man had leveled the same critique of Kate, he wouldn’t have received the same attention, and I don’t recall anyone calling Frank Rich a bitter old man when he criticized Sarah.

My favorite spin, though, is the idea that Mantel is somehow the bully with the upper hand in this alleged joust. She’s depicted in The Daily Mail as having “used her position among the novel-writing elite” to attack a nice, innocent young girl. Pu-lease. Kate is the future queen of England and I’m thinking she can handle herself. If she’s peeved, she can simply order one of the servants to fan her royal brow.

But hey, I’m just an angry shrew, too. This is mainly because, as a woman of a certain age, I sure could use someone to fan my brow.

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